User Experience Design Guidelines for Windows Phone

Windows Phone provides an exciting opportunity to build applications that are available wherever the user is. These applications can be just as useful and engaging as anything built for desktop computing platforms. This guide helps you create a Windows® Phone application that follows best practices for user experience design. Advice presented was collected from the experts who created Windows Phone and from people who were the designers of many of its first applications.

Who This Guide Is for

This guide is for application designers and for application developers who need guidance on how to structure the user interaction model of their phone application. This guide gives you the necessary information to enable you to make the best user-experience design decisions you possibly can. Your real goal should be to create an application experience that enables users to fulfill the scenarios that you intend for them to accomplish.

Spend time up front thinking about end users and how they navigate through the user interface of your application. Make sure to think through the usage scenarios and do some preliminary sketches that show how you believe your screens should be laid out. For information that walks you through that process, see Implementing Windows Phone Application Design.

What This Guide Does Not Cover

This guide will not cover how to design games. Graphical game designs do not lend themselves to the same type of guidance that is necessary for control-based applications.

This guide does not consider any third-party controls and does not give advice on how to properly use them. Only controls that Microsoft® Corporation provides are used.

Windows Phone has a built-in Windows Internet Explorer® browser, which can be used to view websites. This guide does not provide information about how you create a website that detects and formats correctly on a mobile device.